iPod shuffle, price vs the competition?

[Giancarlo]

Originally posted by Thue
Who cares if they are slower then celerons, they are fast enough for far most uses.

Who cares if they are slower then Celerons? Hahaha.. you are going to be in for a surprise.

You are going to get one pathetically slow machine. You realize how slow a Celeron is?

And it is small, and noiseless. And quite cheap, I haven't seem a convincing price comparison for a completely comparable package. And you get to play with OS X, which is probably the best OS user experience available currently (or so I hear).

OS X sucks because it isn't useful. I'm sorry, but I find Windows XP far better then it. Additionally, you can get more in an AMD Sempron based machine at the same price then you get out of a Mini Mac.

Ashers suggestion on the Pentium M is also fine. But I think the Sempron is a little faster...

If nothing else I can run an X server on it, put my current noisy linux athlon 64 3000+ in the basement, and run it over the 100Mbit network when I need the horsepower.

How is an Athlon 64 3000+ noisy? My machine:

http://www.glomar.net/upload1/newcase.jpg

Runs with very little noise and it is an Athlon 64+ 3000 overclocked to 2.2GHz. I have 8 80MM fans in there. So I quite frankly don't know what you are talking about. My machine is quiet and it surprises people. Make sure you don't have dust in the CPU fan (buy compressed air).

[Q Classic]

The whole buzz around the Mac Mini is strange to me. Similar products have been out for ages, and now it's suddenly a new and original thing?

It's the Cult of Mac at work.

I'll say this:
iMac
iPod Mini
iPod Shuffle (Why buy crippled hardware? iPod's the way to go, if you're going to buy an Apple MP3 player...)

but...

Mac Mini
While individually, I'm not impressed with them, and the nano-ITX boards are generally better... the only reason why I can think of them being decent at all is en masse.

Buy them in bulk, and they might be even cheaper than advertised, and wipe 'em clean of OS X and put Linux/PPC on it, and you'll get a decent cluster.

[Agathon]

Buy them in bulk, and they might be even cheaper than advertised, and wipe 'em clean of OS X and put Linux/PPC on it, and you'll get a decent cluster.

That's what all the Slashdot people have been saying. IIRC you could do that with OS X and Xgrid anyway.

[MORON]

flamewars
Gian pwning people
Mac
Computers that you know will run most games that exists

[Giancarlo]

Why would someone want to buy an Mini Mac? Beats the heck out of me. Why would someone want to buy them in bulk? That's even more clueless. People would rather stick with something that is useful.

Useful is a keyword that Apple seems to forget these days. Go into Apple's corporate headquarters, and they wouldn't know what the word means.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Agathon
That's what all the Slashdot people have been saying.

They said the same with the Xbox when it came out, and it's never been really done except for a few experiments.

[Q Classic]

That's what all the Slashdot people have been saying. IIRC you could do that with OS X and Xgrid anyway.

Why would I want the overhead of OS X and Xgrid?

Fez, the reason why you might want to buy Mac Minis in bulk is because alone, they're near worthless as a platform. When you have twenty, thirty, a hundred, you get some probably get some nice discounts, as well has having enough small computers to build a cluster for high-performance computing. Don't let your knee-jerk hate of Macs blind you to the power and promise of clustering--that's how a lot of supercomputers these days get made.

Of course, most of them are done with x86.

Also, I'm not sure how the economics works out, but the major problem with the Mac Mini is that even at its price point, it's still cheaper in most cases to go with the x86 solution.

Besides, people have done that with Xboxes, as Asher has pointed out, as with PS2s (MIPS clusters... like one at Argonne), and so on.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Asher

Name one.

All of them - designed to inflate your ego by trashing and attacking other people.

But it's not -- you say I lie "all the time" and make things up to support my case. That, ironically, is a lie. You always point to the same two examples, both of which are not accurate. For example, the iTunes deleting your music when you moved to a non-USA country with a non-USA credit card -- I didn't make that up, in fact I've linked you to the article many times since. The fact that it doesn't do that any more -- in response to the public backlash, no doubt -- doesn't make it a lie.

The whole thing was a lie. I knew people at the time that article was posted who had moved from the US and suffered no problem. IIRC that person just screwed things up some other way - probably deauthorized their computer. On the very same day you posted that rot, Drake was happily sitting in Japan playing his purchased music.

I'm aggressive online, that doesn't make me anti-social. That's also not even what the point said that you quoted -- I'm one of those types who always has to plan a head. I'm not one of those impulsive people. It bothers me to not have a plan...

As I said, there are degrees to this sort of thing. Many successful people suffer from this disorder. The quotes you pulled down apply to severe cases and only to men.

Aggressive debater = anti-social?

Malicious = anti-social.

Lack of remorse? Just how do you prove that based on Apolyton?

I think plenty of people on Apolyton know just what I mean.

Quit playing games, man. You're usually wrong, and you're way off here again. Professional psychiatrists who I've dealt with strongly disagree with you, as does common sense with a list of the symptoms.

I'm not playing games.

You're almost always out of your league, but you'll never admit it, or admit defeat.

Because you don't give me reason to. You simply repeat your opinion again and again, and selectively quote "facts" to bolster your prejudices.

I'm aggressive online because I have a low tolerance for ignorance. It's not that I constantly just insult people (though it does get to that point with specific people whose names I won't mention), I try to educate as well. I try to post rational, details arguments with support for my claims. In constrast, you exist just to be a contrarian. Seldom do you actually know what's being talked about, and even more rare is when you can actually build an argument based on facts and logic. You're just here to use whimsical rhetoric and ad hominems.

Guilty on the whimsical rhetoric, but what's wrong with that in small doses? I don't believe I have ever posted an ad hominem argument in the technical sense of the term.

Your attempts at facts and logic more often than not consist of vague and unproven generalizations that you take as gospel and refuse to defend properly.

The truth is that you take pleasure in malice.

This thread is a brilliant example. Not only did you first try the smoke-and-mirror approach to debate, you've since abandonded that completely to try to discredit me by trying to analyze my personality now. The best part is, that, too, is wildly inaccurate.

Really? All I can see is that you were proved wrong. You asked for evidence and I supplied it, whereupon you tried to change the subject.

Someone else brought up the issue of your personality, not me.

[Agathon]

They said the same with the Xbox when it came out, and it's never been really done except for a few experiments.

Hence my laughter. Most of them were joking.

[Giancarlo]

Originally posted by Q Cubed
Fez, the reason why you might want to buy Mac Minis in bulk is because alone, they're near worthless as a platform. When you have twenty, thirty, a hundred, you get some probably get some nice discounts, as well has having enough small computers to build a cluster for high-performance computing. Don't let your knee-jerk hate of Macs blind you to the power and promise of clustering--that's how a lot of supercomputers these days get made.

You can do it better when buying PCs in bulk, especially Sempron based CPUs. I hate Macs and I hate any attempts to ever bring them into the market place.

Also, I'm not sure how the economics works out, but the major problem with the Mac Mini is that even at its price point, it's still cheaper in most cases to go with the x86 solution.

I told you so.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Agathon
Really? All I can see is that you were proved wrong. You asked for evidence and I supplied it, whereupon you tried to change the subject.

How does asking for evidence prove someone wrong?

I'm seriously perplexed! How the hell can you ever get in a position of teaching philosophy at a university level?

You said Paul Thurrott said WMP was a bad immitation of iTunes, and I asked you to link it because this was news to me. You linked a review he wrote in which he compares it to iTunes, and I guess that suffices as a citation to you.

Even then, that's not proving me wrong. I don't know anything and everything Paul said (he has some crazy ideas), and I didn't even know he had a blog site.

You need to understand how arguments actually work. Asking for a citation and then providing one that can sorta-but-no-really be construed mean what you wanted it to mean doesn't mean you "win" the argument.

And I didn't try to change the subject, it just became clear your entire position was "Paul is a windows zealot and compared WMP to iTunes and said iTunes is better for music only, and WMP and iTunes have similar features, so therefore he said WMP ripped off iTunes"... That's clearly not a real argument, and there was no point in getting you to copy/paste more irrelevant spam to bury the issue.

Someone else brought up the issue of your personality, not me.

Another Mac user made a silly comment about me having an "inferiority complex", and then you went on this big thing about me being anti-social instead of responding to my actual posts.

[Giancarlo]

I'm kinda surprised the mini-mac just didn't have integrated graphics..

[Asher]

Originally posted by Giancarlo
I'm kinda surprised the mini-mac just didn't have integrated graphics..

That actually requires some engineering work. Apple just took one of the cheapest video chips they could find and used that.

[Giancarlo]

Originally posted by Asher

That actually requires some engineering work. Apple just took one of the cheapest video chips they could find and used that.

Yeah pardon me on that one. Maybe it'll actually turn out slower then an IGP solution. Tell me, is the Radeon 9200 with 32MB run on a PCI port?

[Agathon]

You said Paul Thurrott said WMP was a bad immitation of iTunes, and I asked you to link it because this was news to me. You linked a review he wrote in which he compares it to iTunes, and I guess that suffices as a citation to you.

That's pretty much what he says. He says it is worse, and he says that it is attempting to be more itunes like.

Even Microsoft explicitly admits copying itunes to some degree. It's common knowledge.

That's what it says. Read it yourself, it seems pretty clear to me.

I guess your bluster would pass at the University of Calgary, but that tells you all you need to know.

You need to understand how arguments actually work. Asking for a citation and then providing one that can sorta-but-no-really be construed mean what you wanted it to mean doesn't mean you "win" the argument.

Not another one of your "the article doesn't say what it most obviously says" arguments. I remember the last one of these: the man who meant that the ipod was worse than Creative's players, despite explicitly saying the opposite in the conclusion of his argument.

Another Mac user made a silly comment about me having an "inferiority complex", and then you went on this big thing about me being anti-social instead of responding to my actual posts.

Because you are certifiable.